Eco Shooter: Plant 530 Review

Nintendo suddenly remembers the Wii Zapper.

Nintendo has a habit of not supporting its peripherals. It comes up with them, it sends them out to market, it bundles a single piece of compatible software to showcase them, then, after that, they're done. Nintendo fans' closets are filled with extraneous pieces of dust-collecting plastic that were only ever used once or twice.

The Wii Zapper is one of the most recent of the Big N's forgotten accessories, but, shockingly, it seems somebody back in Japan finally remembered it existed -- because now, over two years after the company introduced the gun-shaped controller shell alongside Link's Crossbow Training, Nintendo's finally published a second first-party design that's compatible with the device. Eco Shooter: Plant 530.

This WiiWare release is a first-person, on-rails shooter developed by Intelligent Systems, the team more often known for its work on the Fire Emblem and Advance Wars brands. It's a ten-dollar download, and for that price you get three levels' worth of shooting cans. Tin cans, oil drums, empty soda bottles -- any and every kind of discarded canister is included, as Eco Shooter's story asserts that a villainous race of aliens called the "Cannoids" have descended upon planet Earth, animated all those many pieces of garbage into living, animal-like can creatures and set about the task of trying to take over the world.

You hear that kids? Your trash will one day try to kill you. That's why we recycle.

That big jumbled mess of stuff in the middle, there? That's a boss.

Recycling actually ends up being the game's core mechanic, too, as main character Mack is armed with a "recycling gun" that serves as your one and only weapon. Moving slowly through each dingy, dirty environment inside the massive recycling facility Plant 530, you use the Wii Remote to point and sweep its targeting cursor across the screen -- you squeeze off shots with the B Trigger, destroying the can creatures and transforming them into glowing globs of pulsating "can energy." You then employ the recycling gun's secondary feature, a vacuum, by pressing Z on the Nunchuk -- sucking up that energy and using it to refill your ammo reserves.

The game becomes a balance between blasting and refueling, as you kill some enemies, recharge for a second or two, go back to killing and so on. The forced forward progress through each level pauses any time you activate the vacuum, which is nice -- but the vacuum can only stay active for a few seconds at a time before it overheats. Not so nice. It's also game over for you, Mack and the litter-filled world if you ever run out of energy entirely, which can be a real concern -- especially in boss battles.

There, giant swarms of cans come together to combine into massive, swirling alien abominations that take hundreds of shots to dispatch. You peel off countless rounds and expend tons of ammo trying to make a dent in these guys, and it's often difficult to see what you're supposed to be shooting at -- the bosses will have clearly noticeable weak points, but there are so many other cans flying around them that it's a real mess to try to make out where you should be pointing your cursor.

In fact, that's a complaint that crosses over to hold true for the game as a whole -- visually, this one's confusing. The game will sometimes play nice, moving the camera slowly and giving you clear viewpoints of your targets. More often, though, the forced scrolling will whip your vantage point around wildly, making you fight against moving forward with the temporary pauses afforded you by your gun's vacuum ability.

And that wouldn't be so bad, either, if the targets weren't always so tough to see. On-rails shooters are more fun, I think, when you dive around a corner and find some massive lumbering zombie about to eat you -- here, your foes are tiny empty cans of Chef Boyardee's spaghetti and meatballs placed a hundred yards away.

The Verdict

So Eco Shooter: Plant 530 is ultimately a decent design, just not really all that impressive in the end. Spending ten dollars for just three levels of blasting away at old garbage, even alien-animated sentient garbage, feels like an uneven investment.

It is nice, though, that somebody at Nintendo finally remembered the old Wii Zapper shell. Though third parties have kept it active with excellent compatible products like Dead Space Extraction, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles and The House of the Dead: Overkill, it was beginning to look like Nintendo itself was never going to support it again -- lucky for the Zapper, it's going to end up being just a bit more remembered than such past peripheral greats as the N64 Transfer Pak, GameCube Broadband Adapter and Hey You, Pikachu! microphone.